I plan on using Twitter and Flickr to capture my week this time. CoverItLive will show the tweets below, and you can follow my Flickr feed or check the widget under CiL to see what I’ve posted there.
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Tag: librarydayinthelife
library day in the life 5, continued
I’ve decided to tweet the rest of this week using the #libday5 hashtag and CoverItLive. Thank you for indulging me.
librarian day in the life #5
Electronic Resources Librarian, Academic Library
Arrived, turned on my computer, and while it booted up, I went and got an iced tea from the café.
Processed new email and scanned a document that I don’t need to retain in paper.
Attended weekly department meeting. We were extra chatty today and went 15-20 min longer than normal.
Worked my way through the action item email messages due today, including updating a resource description on the website and responding to a few inquiries.
Discussed with a co-worker ways we could use GoodReads for the library staff book discussion.
Discussed QR codes and their usefulness/popularity with a co-worker. Used the opportunity to yet again show off how my Android phone is as spiffy (if not spiffier) than his iPhone. I reserve this for Apple fanboys only.
Remembered again that this is DILO librarian day and began this entry.
Caught up on journaling accomplishments from the past three weeks. I’ll thank myself next year when I have to write my annual review. I normally try to do this at the end of each day (I use Memiary), but I’ve been lazy about it, and then overwhelmed by the backlog.
Continued working through today’s action items while chatting with a colleague via IM about the online resource renewal decision workflow/tool that I stole from her. Well, stole the concept, anyway. Learned about something else I can steal, too.
Planned out my project schedule for the week. Then left for lunch with a friend in the dining hall..
Back from lunch and on the Main Service Desk for two hours. Tried to track down a phone number of someone in rural Virginia. Answered an IM question from a law student about borrowing a netbook. Notified building manager that a copier is out of paper. Directed a software question to the Help Desk. Directed a product trainer to the conference room. Directed users to the bound journals. Referred a business student to the business librarian. Checked out a netbook to a user. Looked up a book for an IM user. Read some RSS feeds. Smiled at people passing by the desk.
Back to my cube and sorting through the email that has come in since before lunch. Only one new action item out of the pile. Whee!
Played around with some wiki software options for a departmental intranet. Still haven’t found the right combination of features and function.
Was about to start in on a project when I noticed that there wasn’t a Technorati tag description for librarydayinthelife, so I pulled something together and submitted it. Rewarded myself with peanut butter crackers and a Coke Zero.
Finally got into my current project, which involves pulling together information about our database subscriptions so that we can easily review upcoming renewals well in advance of the deadlines. Tweaked the Access tables, queries, and reports, and then set to adding more data. Worked on this until it was time to go home.
library day in the life – round 4
Hello. I’m the electronic resources librarian at the University of Richmond, a small private liberal arts university nestled on the edge of suburbia in a medium-sized mid-Atlantic city. Today I am participating in the Library Day in the Life Project for its fourth round. Enjoy!
8:30am Arrive, turn on computer, and go get a cup of coffee from the coffee shop attached to the library. By the time I return, the login screen is displayed, and thus begins the 5 minute long process of logging in and then opening Outlook, Firefox, and TweetDeck. Pidgin starts on its own, thankfully. Update location on FourSquare. (Gotta keep my mayorship!)
8:40am Check schedule on Outlook, note the day’s meeting times, and then check the tasks for the day. At this point, I see that it’s time for a DILO, so I start this entry.
8:50am Weed through the new emails that arrived over the weekend. Note that there is more spam than normal. In the middle of this, my boss cancels one of two meetings today. (w00t!)
9:15am Email processed and sorted into folders and labels. Time to dig into the day’s tasks and action items. Chatty coworkers in the cube farm prompt me to load Songbird and don headphones.
9:25am Send a reminder to the LIB 101 students registered for my seminar on Friday. Work out switching reference desk shifts because my Wednesday LIB 101 seminar conflicts with my regular Wednesday shift. Also send out a note requesting trades for next week’s shifts, since I’ll be away at ER&L.
9:40am Cleared all action items and to-do items, so now it’s time to dig into my current project — gathering 2009 use statistics.
10:30am Electronic resources workflow planning meeting for the next year with an eye towards the next five years.
11:00am Back to gathering use stats. I’ve been working on this for over two weeks, and I’m a little over half-way through. I’d be further along if I could dedicate all my time to it, but unfortunately, meetings, desk schedules, and other action items get in the way.
12:15pm Hunger overrides my obsessive hunt for stats. I brought my lunch with me today, but often I end up grabbing something on the go while I run errands.
1:10pm Process the email that has come in over the past two hours. Only two action items added (yay!) and both are responses to request for information from this morning (yay!), so I’m happy to see them.
1:15pm Back to the side-yet-related project that I started on shortly before lunch. We have a bunch of journals in the “Multiple Vendors :: Single Journals” category in our ERMS, and I’m moving them over to their specific publisher listings if I can, checking to see if we have use stats for them, and requesting admin info when we don’t. There are only about 55 titles, so I’m hoping to get most of this done before my reference desk shift at 3.
3:00pm I’m only half-way through the side-yet-related project, but I have to set it down and go to my reference desk shift now. Answering many technology questions from a retired woman who is attempting to take a class that requires her to use Blackboard and view PowerPoints and things that are highly confusing to her. Checking out netbooks to students and showing them how to scan documents to PDF using the copiers rather than making a bunch of copies. Also, catching up on RSS feeds between the questions.
5:00pm Desk shift over. I have just enough time to wrap up my projects for the day and prep for tomorrow, grab a quick bite to eat, and then I’m off to the other side of campus where I have choir rehearsal until 7pm.
Thank you for reading!
DILO: electronic resources librarian
9:00am Arrive at work. Despite getting to bed early, I still overslept. Great way to start a Monday, I tell you.
9:00-9:20am I was out of the office for most of last week, so I spent some time catching up with my assistant. This also gave my computer plenty of time to boot up.
9:20-9:30am Logged into the network, and then went to get some iced tea from the library coffee shop. It takes several minutes for all of the start-up programs to load, so that’s a perfect time to acquire my first dose of work-time caffeine.
9:30-9:35am Start this post.
9:35-10:20am Sifting through the 100+ new messages in my mailbox from the time while I was gone. I followed-up on the ones that looked urgent while I was out, but the rest were left for today. In the end, three messages went into the to-do category and a few more into the use statistics category. The rest were read and deleted.
10:20-10:45am Filled out an order form for a new database. PDF form is printable only, so this required the use of a typewriter (my handwriting is marginally legible). I also discovered in the middle of the process that I did not have all of the necessary information, which required further investigation and calculations.
10:45-11:05am Sent email reminders to the students LIB 101 class that I will be teaching on Friday. Created a class roster for all four sections I’m teaching this spring.
11:05-11:15am Mental break. Read Twitter and left a birthday greeting for a friend in Facebook.
11:15-11:20am Added use stats login info for a new resource to our ERM and the shared spreadsheet of admin logins that we have been using since before the ERM (still implementing ERM, so it’s best to put it in both places).
11:20-11:25am Processed incoming email.
11:25am-12:40pm Was going to run some errands over my lunch hour, but instead was snagged by some colleagues who were going out to my favorite Mexican restaurant.
12:40-1:00pm Sorting through the email that came in while I was gone. Answered a call from a publisher sales person.
1:00-3:00pm Main Service Desk shift, covering the reference side of it. During the slow times, I accessed my work station PC via remote desktop and worked on the scanned license naming standardization project I started last week. In the process, I’m also breaking apart multiple contracts that were accidentally scanned together. As usual, the busy times involved a sudden influx of in-person, email, and IM questions, most often at the same time.
3:00-3:15pm Got a refill of ice tea from the coffee shop, processed email, and read through the Twitter feed.
3:15-4:00pm Organized recently scanned license agreements and created labels for the folders. Filed the licenses in the file drawer next to my cubicle.
4:00-4:20pm Checked in with co-workers and revised my to-do list.
4:20-5:15pm Responded to email and followed-up on action items related to the recent NASIG executive board meeting.
And that, my friends, is my rather unusual day in the life of an electronic resources librarian. Most of the time, I bounce between actual ER work, meetings, and email.
day in the life of an electronic resources librarian
I am participating in the DILOLibrarian project today. This account is by no means comprehensive or reflective of every aspect of my workday, since each one is different depending on the volume of things demanding my immediate attention. However, it may be of interest to my non-ER librarian friends, as well as newly minted librarians and those who are considering this profession.
- 8:45-9:00am Arrived at work, a bit late because my carpool driver and I miscommunicated about today’s plans. Turned on computer, got a cup of coffee, got a breakfast bar, and started this post.
- 9:00-9:30am Read and responded to new mail that has accumulated since Thursday afternoon. Sorted messages that require more than a brief response into Information and To-Do piles.
- 9:30-9:35am Generated a list of print + online and online-only science titles from our Ebsco subscriptions and gave it to the electronic resources associate, per his request. The serials associate and ILL associate both need this info, particularly since we converted as much as possible to e-only this year.
- 9:35-10:15am Sorted through the various to-do lists (both email and Outlook Tasks reminders, as well as a few scraps of notes on paper) and worked on them from oldest to newest. One item was to call back a publisher, but their phone system has been screwed up since last Thursday, which I discovered when I tried again. Also, they gave me the New Jersey office number, not the (correct) New York office number. *headdesk*
- 10:15-10:25am To-do email sorted and cleared from the pile. Reviewed email tagged “waiting for a response” and followed up on those. These are mainly notes from publishers with information regarding electronic resource subscriptions that had been requested by subject liaisons. I hang on to the messages until a decision has been made.
- 10:25-11:00am Took a break from email to work on two of last week’s TechLearning tasks, which I completed just before Andy sent out the email announcing this week’s tasks. Filed those items away in my Outlook Tasks with due dates set for Friday.
- 11:00-11:25am Processed new email that had arrived over the past hour. Took a short break away from the desk. Sent suggested training dates/times to a vendor for a new product we have purchased.
- 11:25-11:30am Checked NASIG executive board email and responded to messages.
- 11:30-11:40am Reviewed and assessed email in the “information” category. Cleared out some items that are no longer needed.
- 11:40am-12:10pm Read through some of the issues on the stack of routed professional journals. I haven’t had any desk time lately, just on-call, so I’ve slipped behind on those.
- 12:10-1:30pm Lunch. Ran errands that took longer than expected.
- 1:30-1:50pm Processed new email (see a theme here?), answered an IM question from a colleague, and checked on my pals on Twitter & FriendFeed.
- 1:50-3:00pm Finished up professional reading backlog.
- 3:00-4:50pm Worked on checking a spreadsheet of electronic resource holdings against what is listed in Serials Solutions. Added/deleted titles, collections, and holdings as needed. Also, paused frequently to respond to email messages as they came in.
- 4:50-5:15pm Browsed through the last couple of hours of tweets. Processed additional email.
- 5:15-5:20 Checked NASIG executive board email again.
- 5:20pm Decided I had done enough for today, so I typed this and… publish.
